The Vél d'Hiv Raid: The French Police at the Service of the Gestapo - Tapa dura

Maurice Rajsfus, a French Jewish survivor who witnessed this infamous roundup, dissects it in a workmanlike book, The Vel D'Hiv Raid: The French Police at the Service of the Gestapo, which was originally published in France 15 years ago. [...] Rajsfus, a former investigative reporter for Le Monde, was 14 years old when thousands of police, at Germany's request, arrested the Jews. His parents, immigrants from Poland, were swept up in the net and sent on to Auschwitz. He discusses this personally painful and unforgettable aspect in another book, Black Thursday: The Roundup of July 16, 1942. -- Sheldon Kirshner * The Times of Israel * If [Rajsfus] still wishes to recall how scrupulously - and even with zeal - the French police applied Nazi orders, he also wants to warn us against certain xenophobic or discriminatory speech still heard recently that could lead to behavior of that bygone age. This episode represents a stain on the honor of the French nation, with its principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality and, in particular, the French police as it does other complicit nations and peoples. [...] As a Vel d'Hiv survivor himself, author Maurice Rajsfus has made a point of documenting, what is now effectively a trilogy, the entirety of France's ill-starred history with respect to its responsibilities regarding Jews and others who suffered in the Holocaust. -- Thomas McClung * New York Journal of Books * Maurice Rajsfus has devoted his life to denouncing and combating racism, fascism, intolerance, and police brutality, while putting in his texts a good dose of caustic irony.

This book is the only contemporary analysis of the Vel d'Hiv roundup, its precursors and its aftermath. A uniquely detailed study of a notorious incident of cooperation between xenophobic and anti-Semitic forces. Undeniable proof of French police's role in the roundups of Jews, denied for over 50 years, and full documentation of which was criminally destroyed. Shocking, large compilation of published articles in the collaborationist press that promoted social discord and hatred of Jews, distorted or obscured the raids on immigrant Jews in Paris under Nazi occupation, and used emotional appeals to nationalism to justify persecution. A companion piece to Rajsfus' previous title, Operation Yellow Star/Black Thursday: The voice of Maurice Rajsfus is valuable and unique because it mixes his narrative as a victim of the roundup with the sharp perception of the journalist that he became. Appendices include: the 1995 speech by President Jacques Chirac that was the first official apology and acknowledgement of French police participation in the Vel d'Hiv raid; flyers translated from Yiddish showing the organization and resistance of immigrant Jews under the Occupation; Police Chief Emile Hennequin's decrees organizing the raid with instructions for making arrests, bus allotments to arrondissements, the number of police, etc.